Flash Lite 1.1 for AU

The time is coming around again for me to pick up another mobile phone. One of the primary reasons is in order to test content. Up to this point I have been a loyal NTT DoCoMo user (5 handsets in 3 years) and my current primary mobile is an SH900i for Docomo's 3G Foma service. Besides the wide array of features (Mega pixel camera, video phone, java games, web enabled, etc), my primary reason for upgrading was to have support for 100kb Flash Lite 1.0 movies. Prior to this I was using the 505i series that were the first phones to support Flash Lite (20kb max). I have been creating Flash Lite content since the beta release was made available to some content providers here in Japan and since that time have pretty much pushed the medium to its limits (which are not all that vast), but... I digress.

This time around I am thinking of going with an AU handset by provider KDDI. In November, they will be releasing the "Talby" (pictured below), a stylish little phone that supports the Flash Lite 1.1 player. I have been itching to develop some solutions using 1.1, exploiting the capabilities that are so painfully absent from the DoCoMo 1.0 port (ability to pull/push data from external sources, send variables, load movie, fscommand/fscommand2, etc), but without a true handset to test on, it is rather pointless. Yes, there are emulators, but these do an extremely poor job of reflecting one of the biggest issues in Flash Lite dev....system resource usage.

We have already started throwing around ideas for having the phone interface with some of our PC RIA (note that 1.1 still uses a subset of AS 4.0). So, we will keep you updated once the R&D begins!

Posted by Kris at October 23, 2004 11:12 PM